Plate Capacitor question (literally a plate cap)

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Original poster: "Andy Cobaugh by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <kb3ewy-at-rcn-dot-com>

Hello All,
    Last night I though of a great way to make a capacitor.  Seeing as my party
cup capacitors worked until I got bad connections inside, I thought, wouldn't
disposable plastic plates work as a dielectric too?  Take a sheet of aluminum
foil and fold it a couple of times, draw a cutting pattern onto it, place the
resulting plates between the plates, put it under some oil (a tupperware cake
container comes to mind here) and ta da!  My question is, should one use two
plastic plates between the sheets of aluminum?  Probably right in case of
imperfections in the plastic. This would be easily assembled, and if anything
happened inside it would be easy to take apart too.  One other thing: It would
be easy to compress to, just put something heavy on top of the stack.  I might
try it today if i can find some plastic plates.  Using the formula for plate
capacitors and using the area of a circle, it seems that 10 cells would give
maybe around 10nF.
 
Andy, KB3EWY
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